Kate Breakey: Stilled Lives

Kate Breakey: Stilled Lives January 5 — February 24, 2007

The soft arc of a Ruby-crowned Kinglet's head; the flirtatious pose of a motionless bird; the delicate petal of a blue rose; the explosive color of a flower after it blooms; the delicacy of a feather resting atop a dressed table. Extinction never looked more beautiful than through the eyes of Kate Breakey, whose large scale painted photographs of decaying flowers, aged fruit and lifeless birds pay homage to death and the remaining spirits that persist in her second exhibition, "Stilled Lives."

Kate Breakey first conceived of this project in 1995 as a visiting lecturer at the University of Texas, when she tried to rescue a sparrow from the claws of a cat. As she said in a 1999 interview, "I realized I couldn't help the circumstances of its death, but I could memorialize it in a photograph." This realization gave birth to a project which has spanned more than nine years and can be seen in two books, Small Deaths (1997) and Flowers/Birds (2003).

Like the early practitioners of nature morte or mementos mori paintings and photographs, Breakey embraces death as part of life, understanding their parallels. She is careful to present these stilled lives as they appeared in reality, photographing her subjects in black and white and then painstakingly painting each feather and stamen its true natural color. Enlarging them to 32 x 32", and most recently working 9 x 9", Breakey paints back the colors death has absorbed, using oil paint and colored pencils. These larger-than-life portraits act as memorials to the small creatures found within the desert of Tucson (where she now lives) and in packages sent from friends all over the country. The resulting images are both startlingly beautiful and arresting, as small creatures and objects gain a heroic status. Through Breakey's art, we confront our own mortality and the fears or solace it elicits.

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